Washington zero-sum mindset out of place today: China Daily editorial

Some Western media outlets have tried to portray the ongoing Beijing Xiangshan Forum that started on Sunday as a platform for China and Russia to display a united stance against the United States and its allies.

That is a gross distortion of the annual defense and security symposium Beijing has been hosting since 2006, as it is by no means an occasion calling for confrontation, but a platform striving for peace.

That Beijing and Moscow chose to openly lay their respective concerns with Washington on the table at the forum for candid communication with the US side indicates there remains space for military-to-military dialogue aimed at avoiding miscalculations and deepening mutual understanding.

Both the Ukraine crisis and the Palestinian question demonstrate how misjudgment, if allowed to become the basis for decision-making, can result in devastating conflicts. These lessons must be heeded by the stakeholders in the Asia-Pacific, so that flash points such as tensions in the South China Sea and the Taiwan question do not flare into conflict.

But what these regional flash points — with the Taiwan question being China's internal affair — have in common with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza is that the US is playing an ugly role in them all, inciting and then exploiting tensions with the purpose of maintaining its regional dominance and global hegemony.

That makes the US delegation a focus at the Xiangshan Forum, which was attended by representatives of more than 100 countries, regions and international organizations. More and more developing countries, the "silent majority" that the US has taken for granted for long, would like to use the forum as a platform to have their voices heard.

Although the US delegation, led by the US Defense Department's principle official for issues related to China, serves only as a messenger for the Pentagon at the event, the face-to-face communication with other stakeholders will leave them in no doubt as to how countries outside the US' "circle of friends" view its interventionism based on its sense of exceptionalism and might-is-right security concept.

Zhang Youxia, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of China, made clear in his opening address at the forum, that the Taiwan question is the primary concern of China. Zhang's warning that the Chinese military will take resolute action to defend the country's core interests on the Taiwan question, no matter who is trying to separate the island from its motherland, should not fall on deaf ears.

The voices of nations critical of the US' single-minded pursuit of hegemony should remind Washington that the US should not seek to impose its own will on others, and make its interests the exclusive purview of global governance.

If the US continues to disregard the fact that it is a member of a global community with a shared future, like it or not, the modernizing of the "rules-based order" will be needlessly traumatic, and potentially catastrophic for all, including itself.